Never miss an important tweet ever again; that’s what I thought when Twitter introduced mobile notifications. This quickly became overwhelming. Often times I’d take up my phone and be greeted with 10+ notifications, these notifications pushed all other notifications off the screen. Each notification lit up the screen, which in turn increased battery usage. I resorted to enabling iOS’s do not disturb feature to temporarily disable all mobile notifications; but I what I really wanted was a better way to manage Twitter notifications. Regular usage was also impacted with frequent banner notifications, interrupting games and other activities.

The notifications had become far too pervasive, so I sought a way to opt-in to tweet notifications when I saw fit. The solution? Allow Twitter notifications to be displayed only in the notifications tray. Using Settings.app, I tweaked the Twitter notifications by increasing recent items to 10, setting alert style to none, and finally disabling Lock Screen notifications.

The Twitter app appears to be offended by these settings. Attempting to add new notifications with these settings produced the message below.

Apparently one must enable Twitter banner notifications to be able to enable notifications on the iPhone. This means if I see a Twitter account I’d like notifications for, I must perform the following steps to do so while maintaining my opt-in settings:

- Exit Twitter

- Open Settings.app

- Turn on banners notifications

- Switch back to Twitter

- Enable notifications on individuals account

- Switch back to Settings.app

- Turn off banner notifications.

A minor setback each time, but inconvenient all the same.

Twitter, why do I need banners notifications when switching on notifications for an individual account? Is this your doing, or an iOS restriction?

Also, have you considered an auto generated list that essentially collates the tweets of users we have switched on notifications for? Having this list auto-generated saves the user the step of adding the user to a list each time he switches on notifications for that user.